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Russian Language Facts

Basic Facts About the Russian language

Russian language belongs to the Indo-European family of languages,
Slavic group, East Slavic branch. It was derived from the Old Russian
language in 14th-15th centuries, from which Ukrainian
and Belorussian languages derived as well. About 250 million people
around the world speak Russian, including 180 million people on the
territory of the former USSR. The closest relatives of the Russian
language are the remaining two East Slavic languages: Ukrainian
and Belorussian, Belorussian being the closest (it should be noted that
in Belarus, beyond the countryside, people speak only Russian,
not Belorussian, so Belorussian is possibly an endangered language).
Other relatives include Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Slovene
from South Slavic branch and Polish, Czech, Slovak, Upper Sorbian, Lower
Sorbian, Polabian (extinct) from West Slavic branch. On the vast
territory of Russia you will see almost no dialectal divisions, almost
all people speak common literary language, only old people might still
use local dialects which vary little from place to place. Russian is
rather a synthetic language, not analytic, and being a synthetic
language it is flective, not agglutinative, which means that it uses a
lot of prefixes, suffixes and flections and it can express in one word
what analytic language like English has to use three words for; but
unlike agglutinative languages, like Finno-Ugrian and Turkish ones, the
same flection might express a lot of different grammatical categories
and different flections might express the same grammatical category.

Closely related to
Russian are the other East Slavic tongues, Ukrainian and Belarusian. The former is
spoken by about 45 million people, mainly in Ukraine and Russia. The
latter, which also uses a form of the Cyrillic alphabet, is the tongue
of about 8 million persons, most of whom live in Belarus. Because of its
large number of speakers and its leading position in the former Soviet
Union, Russian is one of the chief languages of the world. Used
officially by the United Nations, it is important in scientific writing
as well. The great literary works written in Russian also have made the
language culturally significant.

Geographic distribution

Russian is primarily spoken in Russia and the other countries that were
once constituent republics of the USSR. Until 1917, it was the sole official
language of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period, the policy toward
the languages of the various other ethnic groups fluctuated in practice.
Though each of the constituent republics had its own official language,
the unifying role was reserved for Russian. Following the breakup of 1991,
several of the newly independent states have strongly discour aged Russian.
It has clung to its role as the language of common intercourse throughout
the region. In the face of nationalism and shifting political alliances
throughout the CIS, this status may decline in the future.

In the twentieth century, it was widely taught in the schools of the
members of the old Warsaw Pact, and in other countries influenced by the
USSR.

Russian is also spoken in Israel by 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants
from the former Soviet Union (1999 census). The Israeli press and websites
regularly publish material in Russian.

Sizable Russian-speaking communities (totaling in the hundreds of thousands)
also exist in North America, and, to a lesser extent, in Western Europe.
These have been fed by several waves of emigrants since the beginning
of the twentieth century, each with its own flavor of language. The descendants
of the Russian emigrés, however, have tended to lose the tongue
of their ancestors by the third generation.

Official status

Russian is the official language of Russia, and an official language
of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It is one of the six official languages
of the United Nations.

Dialects

Despite levelling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary, a
large number of dialects exists in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects
of the Russian language into two primary regional groupings, "Northern"
and "Southern," with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the
two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central
and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. Dialectology within
Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants.

The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation
and intonation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient
usage now completely discarded by the standard language.

Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the eighteenth
century. In the nineteenth, Vladimir Dahl compiled the first dictionary
that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects
began at the turn of the twentieth century. In modern times, the monumental
Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language, was published in 3 folio
volumes 1986-1989, after four decades of preparatory work.

Pronunciation and Grammar

It is difficult to
master Russian pronunciation because the accent is free; that is, it can
be placed on any syllable. Thus, there being no set rules for stress,
the accent of each word has to be learned separately. In fact, the
position of the accent on a given word may vary as the word's case and
number change when it is declined. Some words that are spelled alike are
distinguished only by a different stress. In addition, no significant
differentiation is made between long and short vowels. Grammatically,
Russian is highly inflected. The noun has six cases (nominative,
genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and locative), with an
occasional seventh case, the vocative. There are three declension
schemes and three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Although the
verb has only three tenses (past, present, and future), it is enabled
by a feature called aspect to express numerous subtle shades of meaning,
some of which cannot be rendered even in English. In addition the
Russian verb has five moods and four voices.

Some Facts about Russia

Russia is the general name for the independent, federal
republic in eastern Europe and western and northern Asia officially called
the Russian Federation.